Charlotte's Heart Transplant

What is rejection? After transplant, one of the words that gets thrown around a lot and causes a lot of panic is 'rejection'. Because your new organ is in fact not yours the body sees it as a 'foreign object'. The antigens on the new organ are different to what the body recognises and this is why during transplant assessment they test your blood for your personal antigens and they try and match them as closely as they can to your donor organ, the closer they are the lower the risk of rejection. So you're not just matched based on blood type, it's a lot more complex than that. However, no matter how close the match, rejection of some scale is almost certain to happen in the first 6 months after transplant, although it is usually treatable (or often doesn't even need treatment) because it is caught early through frequent biopsies. Biopsies test for rejection at a cellular level before damage is done to the organ, there are 4 levels used to describe rejecti...

08.07.2018 I thought I would catch you all up on where I'm up to in my recovery! I am now 4 months post-op. At 3 months I was allowed to drive again because the breastbone is usually healed after that time, and it can then take up to 6 months for the muscles to stitch back together. Pain level Even though I was allowed to lift things like shopping bags after three months I was still quite weary as my chest was still quite sore. At this moment I have no chest pain at all. I can't quite pinpoint when it stopped hurting I just know that it doesn't hurt anymore! Which is great. It means I can now sleep on my stomach again! This might not seem like a big deal but I slept on my back for three months, propped up with pillows for the first couple because it hurt to lay flat. I gradually started sleeping on my side for parts of the night but my chest would be sore every morning when I woke up. So, I was only taking paracetemol first thing in the morning when I woke because it...